The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art, merely by inclusion in this section.
A cluster may be defined as a group of components, such as PCs or workstations, that work cooperatively together in some fashion. A cluster file system is a kernel mode component, which resides on each member of the cluster and allows shared access to files on storage in some fashion to all the members of cluster. Most contemporary implementations of clusters use a manual method for adding nodes to the cluster. Manually configuring a new node requires at least two steps, which include: (1) manually booting the new node using a boot node command, and (2) once the new node is booted, once again starting the node installation program to force each node to read all the node configuration data of the new node. In some circumstances, the volume must be taken offline during manual configuration.
The problem of adding a node to a cluster becomes even more aggravated in a cluster file system, because the cluster file system is typically integrated with the operating system, and, therefore, there is little infrastructure upon which to build mechanisms to set up and manage a cluster file system.
As stated above, in cluster file systems, manual configuration of nodes is required when a node is added to the system. The manual changes need to be made not only on the node being added, but also on the nodes already part of the cluster. Some of the cluster file systems also require taking volumes offline before this kind of an operation is permitted.
It would be desirable to have a configuration mechanism that avoids the aforementioned problems.